Reality TV. It’s what the world has come to. Perhaps you’re into it, and perhaps you need to be shoved under the tires of a fully-loaded funeral coach. But there’s a style of reality filmmaking that pre-dates the contemporary televised train-wreck. Long before The Real World and The Biggest Loser, a quiet but powerful art form called the documentary would educate and inform people of facts and lifestyles they had no hopes of experiencing for themselves. Geoff Harkness of Passim Productions is still practicing this art form.

I recently caught up with Geoff at a convention where I was introduced to his documentary, National Vampire. Even several years after its 2006 release, the film is a fascinating and informative look at vampire culture.

The man behind the vision, and quite often the camera, is every bit as passionate about the subject now as when he filmed the documentary. Geoff was most gracious with his time to speak with me concerning this documentary, as well as his past and future endeavors, and several peeks behind-the-scenes of the making of a documentary.

For the Chateau Grrr Guests who haven’t seen your documentary National Vampire yet, how do you describe it?

National Vampire is a trip through the world of vampire culture. It explores all the various overlapping sub-cultures that comprise the larger vampire community and takes a look at each one of those.

Why did you choose the vampire culture?

It seemed interesting and different and something I really didn’t know existed in such a broad form. I was surprised and intrigued when I learned about the various elements of it. I thought it would be a very interesting film.

So you weren’t into vampires prior to making National Vampire?

I’m always into weird sub-cultures and weird stuff, not vampires specifically. It wasn’t my biggest interest in life or anything but any time you have something interesting going on in a sub-cultural level, I’m generally interested.

How much research do you conduct before launching into a documentary?

For National Vampire, there was a lot of research that went into it. I read dozens of books. I went to every website and message board, every chat room I could find online. This was six, seven years ago when I started doing the research so the Internet wasn’t quite what it is today. There wasn’t a vampire Facebook page or something. I had to do a lot of research and a lot of digging around. I read a lot of material; Katherine Ramsland, Rosemary Guiley, and people like that.

How long did you expect National Vampire to take?

It’s always hard to gauge. Vampire was the most ambitious project that I had done to that point. I don’t know. I probably wasn’t expecting it to take as long as it did, but documentaries you shoot until you feel you’ve got what you were looking for. With Vampire, that took a long time. It was shot over a three year period.

And the editing?

The editing took a year. It took a long time. It was a really long project and I was working on other stuff in between. There was tons of footage. The original cut of the film was two and a half hours. It took a long time to beat it into shape.

What was involved in finding and choosing all the people for the interviews?

The main thing I was trying to find were events, things where I could go and shoot people doing something rather than just interviewing them. The challenge was to find events that were vampire related, then find people that were participating or connected to those events that were willing to talk to us. That was the criteria. They had to be doing something and not just talking about what they did, because a few hours of that would be pretty boring to watch.

Would you go to events to find connections and interview them or to find other interviewees?

There was a little bit of that, but not a lot partially because it was so spread out. There was definitely some of that snowball sampling of interviews where we’d find one person and go to the next, but a lot of the work was done in advance.

I would do a lot of the contact and preparation with people before the event and try to build those connections so by the time I got there and was filming, I already knew what was going on, and people knew who I was... a little bit of pre preparation. Certainly people we interviewed made recommendations. It was tough. It was hard to get people who are into sort of bizarre sub-cultures to talk sometimes about that.

Is there usually something offered to people being interviewed?

No, we didn’t pay anyone in Vampire to do interviews. The only person we paid was an expert who insisted on being paid for her interview which we ended up cutting out of the film, only because we just weren’t real happy with it. We didn’t pay anybody for the interviews except that one person who turned out not to be in the film.

For your other documentaries, have you paid for interviews?

No, never. I think Vampire is the only time we’ve paid for an interview and like I said, we didn’t use it so it’s sort of ironic.

What, if anything, would disqualify an interview from making it into the final cut?

It can be any number of things. Sometimes it’s not that there’s a problem with the interview itself, but it just doesn’t fit in with everything else that’s going on around it or the tone of the film. Not so much on Vampire, but there have been times when things like the sound was off or the lighting didn’t work or something like that. In Vampire, there was a lot of stuff that got cut out. There were lots of different reasons for it. Sometimes we felt like it just didn’t fit right with everything else.

There were definitely a few people I interviewed who again weren’t doing something and there was no way to build a scene around that. I had some really good interviews that I liked a lot but I just wasn’t able to use. So often those decisions are made during editing. If it’s not working out for some reason, it’s pretty apparent. We had scenes that were just cut out of the film that we felt weren’t strong enough for some reason or another or we just weren’t happy with them in the end.

So there’s a ton of stuff that got cut out of Vampire. It’d be fun to go back and revisit some of that some day.

Would you ever consider a sequel?

No, I wouldn’t do a sequel, but at some point I will put out the deluxe edition DVD with eight hours of outtakes and deleted scenes and stuff like that. It’d be fun to have some of that stuff see the light of day. Some of it was pretty great. It just didn’t fit with the film too well for one reason or another.

How many interviews would you say you collected before any editing took place?

For Vampire, formal interviews were probably somewhere around fifty. Informal or shorter interviews would probably add another couple hundred for people we talked to briefly. Again, that was over a three year period in all different parts of the US. There was a lot of material.

What do you shoot on?

This was all shot on DV [digital video].

When you set out to make National Vampire, did you formulate a rough plan of segments? Or is it more organic, forming itself?

Yeah, the second. One of the things that’s great about documentaries is they unfold as you’re making them. I have never known exactly what I was going to end up getting. Things start to become apparent as you’re shooting; the scene starts to become relevant. All of this presents itself while you’re shooting and then as you’re editing as well.

No, I rarely have much of an idea what I’m doing before I go. And that’s part of what’s fun about doing documentaries is you don’t really know at the beginning how it’s going to turn out at the end.

What was the craziest thing that happened when collecting interviews for National Vampire?

Probably the craziest thing that ever happened was while we were filming the suspension stuff which is where people are suspended by the hooks [through their flesh]. One of our camera crew actually fainted in the midst of filming and had to be revived by one of the groups there.

They fortunately knew exactly how to do it. They had smelling salts and sugar tablets and all this stuff to revive her with. She fainted in the middle of filming it because it was pretty gruesome to sit there for two - three hours with cameras. That was probably the craziest thing.

How many people were in your camera and interview crew for National Vampire?

It changed almost every time. There was almost never a consistent crew. I worked with different people at different times. Sometimes it was just me shooting everything and doing it by myself, and then sometimes I had a crew as large as two or three people helping and doing things like lights and camera work and stuff like that.

The original crew for Vampire was me and two of my good friends, Eliott Reeder and Jeff Roos. They did a lot of the early work on the film. The three of us went on the road together and filmed in Dayton, Houston, New York City, New Jersey, Pennsylvania. The three of us went all over the country together, like pirates. They’re very good friends of mind and worked on all of my early projects, so we had a blast on those road trips. Those guys are fearless.

The person who worked on it most was Kjirstin Leach who was the co-editor of the film and also did a lot of the shooting. She went to New Orleans, New York City, Houston, Minneapolis, the stuff in Chicago. She was present for a lot of the shooting. And then she co-edited the film with me. Out of all the people I worked with it would probably be her the most. As I said, it ranged from sometimes just me or me and Kjirstin or me and Kjirstin and somebody else or me and some other people. It all just depended.

Had you and Kjirstin worked together before on other projects?

No, I posted an ad on Craigslist looking for people to help with the film and interviewed a bunch of people. Kjirstin was really good. She has a Masters from Columbia in film, so she’s also somebody who knows what she’s doing. I found her through that interview process. I hired several people through those interviews, but she was the person that worked out the most.

We’ve worked together on a bunch of projects since Vampire. She’s super talented and great to work with. She deserves a lot of credit for how Vampire turned out. She was a huge part of it.

When it’s just you, do you set up all the equipment, get the camera running, and get the folks talking in front of the camera?

Yeah, if it’s just me, I’m literally doing everything. That happened in a couple of scenes in Vampire. One was the first scene with Dnash [the fangmaker]. And then another one was the vampire tour in San Francisco.

Those were the two times when I just happened to be somewhere, had my camera, and that’s sort of “If you’re there, may as well do it!”

Do the people behind the camera make a difference to the people being interviewed?

For sure! A lot of the time that I spent on Vampire was trying to get people to relate to me and connect with me in some way as an interviewer, or to get them speaking as honestly as they could. Particularly in Vampire, a lot of what I did was work with the people I was interviewing to build rapport and try to get to know them beyond just the questions I had for the interview. That partially comes from my background in sociology and journalism. Both of those things tie into the documentary stuff.

How would you build rapport with someone you’ve just met and hope to interview?

It really depends on the person, who they are. Sometimes the people were somewhat similar to me in age and background and things like that and at other times, they weren’t at all. It depends. With academic types, you probably talk more about academics and so forth.

But a lot of it is just asking questions and being genuinely interested. I was curious about this topic. I had a lot of questions and was really interested in what people were doing. You have to build that rapport over time in some cases. Generally, people will respond to that. It takes time too.

Does the crew size matter when you’re trying to establish a connection with people to interview?

It depends on who the crew is. If it’s a crew that gets along really well and there’s a harmony within the set, then it tends to work very well. I have not worked on a lot of projects like this, but I’ve witnessed projects where the crew didn’t seem too happy and that just never works... it just never works at all. We try to have fun.

There’s not a lot of prima donna film behavior on these little documentaries. So there’s nobody demanding more ice for their water or something like that. Everybody’s there to work and they’re there because they like the work and they’re passionate about it. That helps a lot. I think most of the films that I’ve been part of or directed have been that sort of thing. You get a lot of the “film behavior” from people who frankly probably haven’t merited that sort of behavior.

What obstacles did you run into in the making of National Vampire?

Lots of stuff. One of the hard things was getting people to talk to me. One of the hard things was getting people to allow us to film events. One of the hard things was simply the amount of travel and time and money it took to go to New York with a film crew. All of those things were obstacles.

Also just trying to make a film while in the midst of living your own life, trying to have relationships, go to school, and do all the things that you want to do in life. I said during this film the old Scorsese joke “This film is not about vampires... this film is a vampire.” It was very draining and a ton of work.

So those were the biggest obstacles... just making the film itself, persevering through it, trying to see the light at the end of the tunnel at all times, know that there’s an ending to it.

Are you comfortable with discussing the film’s price tag?

I had a producer and financers for it so a lot of my investment was in things like time and stuff like that. It’s hard to say because some of the cost went into things like equipment. I’m not sure that would get added into the cost of the film since that equipment was used on other films too. I don’t know. But it would definitely be a very healthy five-figure number. I’ll leave it at that.

That’s great for people to know in case they ever wake up one morning and decide to shoot their own documentary.

Yeah, don’t do it! (laughs)

How have you promoted and distributed the film since its release?

Originally we got into a few film festivals. We were able to show it at those and make some connections that way. We also signed a distribution deal for it. We went back and forth with a number of companies. We ended up signing a distribution deal with a Canadian company called Tricon [Films]. They picked it up for distribution outside of the US and non-DVDs, so airings on TV and around the world. They’ve done a few things with it.

We’ve also finally opened an online store and sold DVDs and things like that online. And that’s been pretty successful for us. People seem to be picking it up, so that’s good.

What type of reception did the film receive at the film festivals?

Good. Different festivals have different crowds and audiences. We played at the Chicago Horror Festival and I think that was probably the best one. We had a good turnout there. People were interested in it. People had read about it and came to see it because they read about it. That’s always cool to see. I think we had a good response.

Of course you always hope that HBO is going to call you with a blank check and say “We want it”, but that hasn’t happened yet. I’m still waiting for the call.

Did you have any pulse on the vampire community and their reception to it?

Different. Most of the people I’ve talked to said they really thought that it was honest. One of the things that I tried to do in Vampire, and all my documentaries, is be honest.

I hate real “Hollywoody” documentaries, or those things that you see on cable TV. There have been a number of vampire documentaries on cable. I thought that they were all terrible because they look so fake and they always have these people on some set with all this lighting and make-up. At that point, you’re not really capturing reality, you’ve moved far away from it. I think that people appreciated the honesty of the film and the more organic look and feel to it.

At the same time, I think that there were some people who felt like it portrayed the community in a negative light. Some people said “It made us look really bad”, but at the same time, they were like “But, we’ve all met these people too.” It wasn’t dishonest.

I just actually watched Vampire again for the first time in a little while, and I think it holds up. I think it’s a pretty good film. You know... for a guy who doesn’t really know what he’s doing.

You certainly come across as a filmmaker with a great deal of experience and a great editorial sense. What is your background?

I come from a background of sociology and also journalism. I’m finishing a PHD in sociology right now. I’ve been doing sociology for about fifteen years. I’ve also spent about six years working as a journalist. Between those two things, it sort of naturally fit into documentary filmmaking.

When I was starting to get into this stuff, which was ten years ago, I asked someone that I respected if I should go to film school and he said no because he was going to film school. “Just buy a camera and a book and start making films and you’ll be okay.” So that’s what I did. I started making films as part of the sociological research I do.

I think that all of my films have a real sociological angle to them. That’s what I started doing ten years ago. I went out and started making my first documentary. Then I got into doing music videos for a long time. I did some commercials. I sort of got a taste of every aspect of filmmaking. Now, I’ve been doing this stuff for ten years, I feel like I sort of know what I’m doing, certainly more than I did ten years ago.

Filmmaking’s not rocket science at all. It’s definitely something that, especially today, anyone can do. It’s affordable and people should do it if they’re interested in it. It’s just like making music or anything else. It’s all become very possible for the average Joes and Janes to get into. That certainly was my experience.

Looking back over your ten years of experience making films, how would you describe your style of documenting films?

I think all of my films have explored sub-cultures. I notice that element is in all the documentaries I’ve done. I’m interested in looking at sub-cultures that from the outside might appear to be one thing, but then when you get to know the people who are involved in them, you realize that they have more in common with everyone else than maybe you thought.

One thing I try to do is explore sub-cultures, but also try to get past some of the surface stereotypes and find out what’s really going on. The other thing is I’m interested in juxtaposition between dark and light; sort of comedic elements and very dark elements too. I think that comes out in films like Vampire and all of the films that I’ve done. I can’t help it. I like both parts of that.

I seem to have a hard time committing to one tone in my films. They sometimes take shifts from the comedic to the darkly comedic to the dark and then back again. I don’t think that’s an intentional style, I think that’s just a fault of my filmmaking that results in something I can call a style so it sounds better than a guy who can’t commit to a style. After doing four full-length documentaries and tons of other stuff, I see those elements for sure in all the documentaries.

When you watch your completed films, do you feel you add any editorial voice through your choice of interviews or cuts or the music, any of the elements that go into the film?

Definitely. To me, it’s like the editing part of filmmaking is the most interesting part. Once you’ve finally gathered all that stuff and you can sit down and go through it and start looking for the things that stand out to you. That to me is the most exciting part. It’s just really fun. I think if anything, I spend the most time editing and looking at stuff and thinking about things. I think that all of that is really informed by who I am as a filmmaker and the things I’m interested in.

A lot of times when you’re making a documentary, you’ll be doing an interview and somebody says something and you just know that it’s going to end up being in the final film. Like, I know that that sentence is going to make it because it was just phrased so well or just captures a statement that you’re just hoping to capture. I see all that stuff.

Of course, when I look back at my old films now, it’s like looking at old high school yearbook photos. All you see are the bad haircuts and clothes and stuff. But yeah, I think so. The editing to me is really where your voice comes through as a filmmaker or director or whatever.

Do you feel that National Vampire had a particular voice or moral or some sort of message that either the community expressed through interviews or that the film itself expresses through editing or choice of interviews?

Maybe that’s another hallmark of the films that I’ve made. Usually it’s very ambiguous in terms of a message. In fact, it always is.

I don’t think that there’s a message to the film. I think that I will explore something and look at both sides of it and let the audience decide what they want to take away from that. I try to present both sides of things so that I’m not preaching some sort of message. I don’t think that I could.

During the several years of making National Vampire, what kind of personal epiphanies did you have while working with the vampire community?

Well, I realized I am a vampire, first of all. (laughs)

No, I think the main thing was when I started making it, I thought “Wow, this is weird. These people who do this are weird and it’s going to be weird and freaky.”

After interviewing all the people, I was surprised at how normal everybody was. They’re very, very normal. It’s like some people collect baseball cards and some people drink blood. It’s like weird Americans doing their weird American stuff. I don’t mean that in a negative way, but I mean like maybe somebody who’s a really avid baseball fan or collector. A lot of the vampire people reminded me of that. It’s just something that they were really fascinated by and really into and it was really cool for them.

By the end of it, I understood why it would be. It was like “Yeah, this is really cool stuff. I can see how you’d get into it.”

If there was any epiphany for me, it was just how normal these people turned out to be. It surprised even me, and I’m pretty non-judgmental going into this stuff.

Who do you look up to as a documentarian or a filmmaker?

There’s so many. I think Steve James who directed Hoop Dreams, and he did an incredible movie called Stevie, an incredible documentary. I think he’s just an incredible documentary filmmaker. He’s from Chicago too. He’s really talented and his work is very personal and I just have been really impressed with what he’s done.

I think as far as non-documentary filmmakers, we all sort of look up to the Martin Scorseses of the world and people like that. Woody Allen, Spike Lee, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Soderbergh, I could go on forever. I’m a huge fan of film and I often don’t know how that translates. I love documentaries and I watch them all the time.

Outside of Steve James and a few other people, I can’t think of any documentary filmmakers whose style I try to emulate, but I’m a big fan of the genre. As far as filmmakers, the list is pretty endless because there’s just so much good stuff out there. Some of my favorite documentaries are Crumb, Hearts of Darkness, Roger and Me, the War Room, Thin Blue Line. Errol Morris, Werner Herzog, these guys are just amazing.

How about your past documentaries and film projects?

The first documentary I did was called Pawn Shop. I was studying pawn shops as part of a school project. Pawn shops are a really weird world and if you haven’t spent time in them, they’re places that are pretty unfamiliar. We’d go out to do this research on pawn shops, then go back to school and talk to professors and students about it. People didn’t really quite understand what pawn shops were and how they worked, who went to them and all that kind of stuff.

I thought “This would be a really interesting documentary.” That was what made me start wanting to make documentaries so I made one about pawn shops.

I got hooked pretty quickly and immediately started working on lots of other projects including a bunch of music videos I did right around that time. I think it was only about six months after shooting Pawn Shop that I shot the next documentary, Elvis Week. That was a study of Memphis, Tennessee. They have a celebration every year in honor of Elvis’ death which is weird.

There’s about fifty thousand people that converge upon Memphis from around the world, most of them dressed like Elvis. It was very bizarre. I was traveling through Memphis one year on my way to New Orleans and it was Elvis Week.

I had no idea; I had never even heard of this. I was like “Wow. Somebody needs to make a film about this for sure. It’s too weird.” I wanted to do something that was like the Trekkies of Elvis and went to Memphis for five days and did that.

Both of those films were shot within a six month period. Then I spent a long time sort of weeding through all the editing. But those two films were my film school. That’s where I learned all the mistakes I try not to make now... and inevitably still do.

Those were like real learning curve sort of things and there were lots of mistakes made on them, but they were really fun; we definitely enjoyed them. I was recruiting friends of mine to help me and it was real exciting to be doing that kind of stuff. I got real hooked on it at that point.

It was probably around that time I was talking to a good friend of mine, Paul Marinescu, who watched me do this and he said “I think you’re ready to do a bigger project.” He was asking me what my dream project would be and it was Vampire. I had been thinking about Vampire for a couple years at that point but I didn’t have the money to do it, but I was like “this is what I would do if I could do anything.” Eventually the financing came through and we made the film. That was pretty cool.

And then in the middle of Vampire, while that was all going on, the shooting and the editing, I actually started shooting another film myself which turned out to be this hop hop documentary. This was the first film where all the shooting was done by me, all of it. I shot that from 2004 until 2008, so four years of shooting and collecting footage.

That was real different because Vampire was done with crews and traveling and hotels and plane tickets and all this stuff while the hip hop film was like grab my camera bag and go and that was it. It was very different and a nice change of pace too. There didn’t have to be a lot of planning and a lot of forethought; it was just grab the camera and see what happens. I learned so much doing that film because I shot so much of it, shot it pretty much all myself. That was new for me because I had not done a lot of the shooting on the previous stuff.

You mentioned making several mistakes through your early films that taught you for the future. What are some of the mistakes you’ve learned from? What are mistakes a documentarian can make?

I’ll give you a great example. One of the first times I ever went to shoot an interview was for Pawn Shop. I bought a microphone because I was like “Oh, I need a microphone if I’m going to do an interview.”

I went and set everything up. I think there was someone there helping me. Shot this whole interview; sat down with this guy for like an hour. It was this awesome interview, really good. I went home and downloaded the footage and I had failed to note that this microphone I had bought required batteries and I hadn’t put a battery in it. So I had just done my whole interview and there was no sound. None.

And you cannot fix that. No amount of Pro Tools or After Effects in the world are going to fix that situation. Things like that happened early on where it’s like “Oh, we had to have a battery for this? Who would have known?”

There’s definitely things like that early on. Even some of the Vampire footage like the footage I shot in San Francisco for the vampire tour and interview. I just didn’t know how to use the camera or something and it turned out all blue. It was really weird looking. We ended up getting it color-corrected which saved it. If you had seen the original footage, she looked like a Smurf or something. It was very weird looking.

So often it’s technical things like that that occur in documentaries that are the mistakes. And then there’s also the mistakes like on Vampire. We shot a convention for Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans. It was called Buffy Con. It was a big convention in New Jersey. It was pretty good. We got some good interviews, but we wound up cutting the scene from the film though because as a crew, we didn’t do a very good job of capturing the events at this convention.

We interviewed a bunch of people, but that’s what I was talking about earlier when it’s like you have to have them doing something or it doesn’t work, you know? In a documentary, you really have to show people doing stuff rather than just have people talking about doing stuff.

And so that was a scene that we ended up cutting because I think as a crew, we didn’t do our job. We made the mistake of not shooting enough “B” role footage or whatever you’d call it, to have a scene that was good. And that’s too bad because it was a funny convention with some interesting people and it would have and could have been a really good scene if we had just done a better job.

I think I learned a lesson of “You don’t put the camera down until you know you’ve recorded 110% of what you need rather than 75%”.

Something I’ve always been curious about. Say you had shot a crowd scene at the Buffy convention. Would you have needed a release form for every one of those people in the crowd scene?

No, generally if you’re doing a public event, then you don’t. If I was shooting some private event, then I might. With Vampire, basically anybody we talked to, if they spoke on camera, we got a release form from them, but if they were just somebody who was at an event and there was the public thing and a bunch of other people were there, we’re obviously shooting on video. It’s pretty obvious what we’re doing. Then we didn’t get permission from every single person in the room.

There were a few people who would ask us not to put them on camera and we would always abide by that for sure.

What plans do you have for any future documentaries?

Oh, I’ve always got some stuff in the works. I’m most likely going to do some sort of documentary about stand-up comedians. That’s probably the next thing I’m interested in. Again, it’s a sub-culture of interesting characters and people, but it also takes a certain sort of fortitude to get up in front of a crowd of total strangers and try to make them laugh, you know, for fifteen minutes or half an hour.

I think it’s pretty incredible when good stand-up comedians really do their thing. I think that’s pretty incredible. I’m interested in what motivates somebody to get into that world and want to do something like that. I think it takes a certain type of individual. I’m interested in who that might be. That’s probably going to be the next big documentary.

I have some smaller projects. I’m shooting a music video next month and I have some other small things lined up. And then we have a film festival in September that I’m helping to organize. That’s keeping me busy right now. I’ve never done a film festival, so that’s a new sort of world. I’ll definitely be making documentaries for the foreseeable years into the future. It’s something I just love to do so much. Nobody does documentary films for the money. You do it because you really like it. I’ll keep doing it.

Can you see yourself making a film other than a documentary?

Yeah, I’ve actually done a short film called “Warning Signs.” I don’t have much in the way of professional training, but I have taken a course in video production at school. For this class, we were assigned to write, cast, film, and edit a short movie. I think it had to be five or ten minutes.

I did one about all my crazy dating experiences and all the bizarre women that I met in Chicago. It was kind of a funny fictional...semi-fictional film about it. It was really fun.

What’s amazing about actual fictional film is how quickly you can shoot them. It’s like “Wow. This didn’t take a year to shoot. You can do it in a week!” That’s very interesting and appealing to me.

I can definitely see going into doing some sort of feature films again. The technology is just getting so much better and so much cheaper that eventually as I said, Average Joes like me will be able to make films that look like the real thing. That’s cool. I can see going into that type of stuff for sure, but I’ll always do documentaries no matter what.

What is your ultimate dream as a filmmaker?

To keep doing what I’m doing, which is sort of melding the worlds of academia and film into whatever it is that I do. I don’t even know if there’s quite a name for it, but it’s great.

Although I’m nowhere near there financially, I feel as if a lot of times I live the life of a millionaire because everyone asks “If you were a millionaire what would you do?” and it’s like “This.”

I would do academic stuff and do film stuff, so all the stuff I’m doing. So even though I don’t have all the money, I feel like in some ways I have a version of the lifestyle in that I get to do things that I love and I’m passionate about and they’re interesting to me. That is really cool. So if I can continue to do that, I’ll be really really happy.

If some big Hollywood producer comes along and wants to take me for a ride on the magic express to big time filmmaking, I probably wouldn’t turn down the opportunity, but I don’t see that sort of thing in my future. I don’t think that will happen because the types of films that I make aren’t real “Hollywoody” and formulaic. I have a hard time doing that.

Doing what you want to do is what really matters. If I had tons of money, this is the same stuff I would do. So I’m lucky that I’m able to do it. I think it’s really cool. Obviously everybody has to figure out a way to pay the rent and all that kind of stuff, but I feel after ten years I’m getting to a point where I think I’m going to be able to put something together that combines doing this stuff and I’ll be able to call it a career. And that’s cool. Ultimately, I think that’s all people want is to do stuff that inspires them.

Will you be doing any upcoming horror conventions promoting National Vampire?

As they come up, yes. We’re definitely open to all that kind of stuff. The hip hop film is something that we’re entering into the film festivals, and people have been inviting us to do things like that. As those opportunities come up, yeah. I’m always going to look for them. It’s fun to go talk to people and see all the vampire fans.

That last one, the Twilight event, was great, because I saw Father Sebastiaan, who was in Vampire. I hadn’t seen him since we had done the film. He’s been living in Paris and all that and he’s such a funny guy and a great character and I love him to death. It was great to get to see him.

And it’s always fun to get to see guys like Marty Riccardo, who I see around a lot. We’re supposed to do some sort of in-store event with Marty Riccardo coming up in a few months in Berwyn. Be on the look out for that.

I know I’ll certainly be there! Geoff, thank you so much for taking the time to tell Chateau Grrr Guests about the behind the scenes of National Vampire and all that goes into a documentary. We wish you tons of luck on this and future projects!